Tuesday, February 12, 2013

The peer review system has decayed to the point where the culture of the two “top” science journals virtually guarantees they will reject the most important research done today. It is the exact opposite of what we need to further human knowledge the fastest. Science and Nature are prestigious journals, yet they are now so conservative about ideas that challenge dominant assumptions, that they reject ground-breaking papers because those papers challenge the dominant meme, not because the evidence or the reasoning is suspect or weak.

The brief window for drilling, based on ice floes and agreements with Alaska Natives to protect whales and other wildlife, opens in July and continues into October...After a day of drilling last September, Shell was forced to disconnect the rig from its seafloor anchor as a large ice pack approached 10 miles away.